The aim of this study was to construct a closed-end measure of moral reasoning on interpersonal violence and to explore the relationship between television exposure and children's use of moral reasoning strategies. Participants were 377 elementary school children in fourth to sixth grade who completed questionnaires containing measures on moral reasoning and violent and non-violent television viewing. The reliability and validity of the CEMRIV as a scale of moral reasoning are discussed. Regression analyses indicated that exposure (...) to violent television content was positively related to a preference for authority-based reasoning on interpersonal violence. Violent television exposure was also a significant predictor of the preference for approval-oriented reasoning about prosocial dilemmas. Furthermore, non-violent television viewing was positively associated with a preference for perspective-based moral reasoning. These findings provide support for a mental model approach. (shrink)

The aim of these two studies was to test to what extent television advertisements reflect gender-role differentiation in two countries: Poland and Britain. British and Polish samples of television advertisements were analyzed and compared with previous studies. The results show slightly more gender-role stereotyping in Polish television advertisements, and a slight decline of stereotyping in Britain. The second study was conducted on children's advertisements following Furnham, Abramsky, and Gunter's content analytic study. In general, there were more (...) advertisements oriented towards both girls and boys, and there were more males as central figures. The differences between two countries were not major, suggesting that levels of gender-stereotyping in Poland and Britain are similar, with slightly more stereotyping present in Polish advertisements. (shrink)

Western societies are confronted with a growing number of overweight and obese children. Past studies have pointed to excessive television viewing as one of the causes of this phenomenon. The aim of the current study was to examine the influence of parental mediation and modeling on TV use and obesity among pre-school children. A survey conducted among 608 parents of two-and-a-half to six year olds shows that obese children watch significantly more television, show more affinity (...) towards television and more often have a TV set in their bedroom than normal weight and overweight children. For girls, parental restrictions on television viewing are negatively associated with their BMI. For boys, no similar relationship can be found. This study suggests that taking into account possible differences in television viewing behavior between pre-school boys and girls and paying attention to a wide range of television viewing variables can be fruitful for further research. (shrink)

The evidence reveals that young children are targeted by food and beverage advertisers but are unable to comprehend the commercial context and persuasive intent of marketing. Although the First Amendment protects commercial speech, it does not protect deceptive and misleading speech for profit. Marketing directed at children may fall into this category of unprotected speech. Further, children do not have the same First Amendment right to receive speech as adults. For the first time since the Federal Trade (...) Commission's original attempt to regulate marketing to children in the 1970s , the political, scientific, and legal climate coalesce to make the time well-suited to reevaluate the FTC's authority for action. This paper analyzes the constitutional authority for the FTC to regulate television food marketing directed at children as deceptive in light of the most robust public health evidence on the subject. (shrink)

In response to the obesity epidemic, much discussion in the public health and child advocacy communities has centered on restricting food and beverage marketing practices directed at children. A common retort to appeals for government regulation is that such advertising and marketing constitutes protected commercial speech under the First Amendment. This perception has allowed the industry to function largely unregulated since the Federal Trade Commission 's foray into the topic, termed KidVid, was terminated by an act of Congress in (...) 1981. The FTC has since focused on self-regulation as a potential solution to such concerns. However, this method of control has proven ineffective to protect children, and has led to growing recognition that federal regulation may be necessary.Since KidVid, the evidence has only mounted that children are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of advertising. Over the same time period, the exposition of commercial speech jurisprudence has plateaued, as the Supreme Court has not decided a pure commercial speech case since 2002. (shrink)

The study aims at exploring the salience and functions of media and television contents in children’s lives by focusing on their uses as a discursive resource in naturally occurring peer talk. We observed and recorded Israeli children talk in everyday, natural settings in two separate studies, in 1999–2002 and in 2012–2013. Detailed discourse analysis of television-based interactions from an ethnographic, child-centered perspective reveals the enduring centrality of television as an enjoyable, available, and shared cultural resource (...) with valuable social, cognitive, and discursive affordances: it is frequently mentioned during everyday adult-free interactions; utilized as the basis for drawing and negotiating boundaries and hierarchies within the peer community; and facilitates experiencing a variety of discursive literacy skills, ranging between practicing adherence to original texts and creativity and distancing from them. These findings provide further evidence for the mediatization of everyday life, and may have educational implications, which are discussed. (shrink)

To reduce negative emotional responses and to stimulate prosociality, constructive journalism promotes the inclusion of positive emotions and solutions in news. This study experimentally tested whether including those elements indeed increased prosocial intentions and behavior among children, and whether negative emotions and self-efficacy are mediators in this regard. To this end, children were exposed to an emotion-based, solution-based, or non-constructive news video. Results showed that emotion-based and solution-based news reduced children’s negative emotions compared to non-constructive news. No (...) direct effects for prosocial intentions were found, but solution-based news led to less prosocial behavior than emotion-based and non-constructive news. Moreover, negative emotions served as a mediator, self-efficacy did not. The more negative emotions were elicited by a news story, the higher the prosocial intentions and behavior. In conclusion, a constructive style of reporting helps to reduce children’s negative emotional responses but subsequently hinders prosociality. (shrink)

A content analysis of 601 commercials was conducted in order to identify the appeals that characterize commercials aimed at children and teenagers. Our findings demonstrated that the use of appeals showed strong age differences and was highly gender-role stereotyped, particularly in commercials aimed at children. The most typical appeals in commercials aimed at male children were action-adventure, sports, and play, whereas commercials aimed at female children emphasized nurturing, physical attractiveness, friendship, and romance. Having the best, competition, (...) and achievement were the dominant appeals in commercials aimed at male teenagers, whereas romance, sexuality, and belonging to a group were emphasized in commercials aimed at female teenagers. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak forced most of the world’s population to be confined at home to prevent contagion. Research reveals that one of the consequences of this confinement for children is an increased amount of time spent using screens (television, computers, and mobile devices, etc.) at home. This exploratory study aims to analyze the association between screen time exposure and emotional/behavioral problems of infants and children aged under 7 years, as manifested during the lockdown period in (...) Portugal due to the coronavirus disease 2019 outbreak. The study was controlled for sociodemographic and confinement variables. A sample of 193 parents of children aged from 6 months to 6 years and 12 months, residing in Portugal, completed a survey about the time and manner of use of screen time exposure of their children. Data were derived on circumstances both before and after the confinement; the survey also explored the child’s behavioral and emotional adjustment. The findings revealed a modest relationship between children’s exposure time to screens and behavioral and emotional problems on children studied. It was also found that parents may play an important role in children’s behavioral and emotional adjustment during the confinement period. (shrink)

Using telephone interviews among a random sample of 537 Dutch children aged 7–12 years old, we investigated the prevalence of fear reactions to television news among younger and older children and among boys and girls, what types of news items children in different age and gender groups refer to as frightening, and whether children's fear reactions to regular adult television news differed from their fear reactions to a special children's news program. Overall, 48.2 (...) % of the children who reported watching the adult or children's news programs, reported fear reactions to adult news, while 32.6 % reported fear of children's news content. For both types of news programs, younger children and girls more often reported fear than older children and boys did. The most prevalent fear-inducing news content categories were interpersonal violence, fires, accidents, and disasters, and visual depictions of the consequences of violence. (shrink)

The Archaeology of Semiotics and the social order of things is edited by George Nash and George Children and brings together 15 thought-provoking chapters from contributors around the world. A sequel to an earlier volume published in 1997, it tackles the problem of understanding how complex communities interact with landscape and shows how the rules concerning landscape constitute a recognised and readable grammar. The mechanisms underlying landscape grammar are both physical and mental, being based in part on the mindset (...) of the individual; the same landscape can thus evoke different meanings for different people and at different times. People's perception has greatly influenced the construction of landscapes over millennia but, until recently, the potential of this area has been largely untapped. Apart from chapters focusing solely upon human interaction with landscape, there are several which skilfully integrate artefacts and place with landscape (e.g. Gheorghiu and Sognnes). Other chapters look at the way people have marked the landscape through such mechanisms as rock-art (e.g. Clegg, Devereux, Estévez, Fossati, Kelleher and Skier). Rock-art establishes personal and communal identity in relation to landscape and it is clear that other forms of visual expression were in place which distinctively created special places within the landscape. Landscape constructs can bind cultures together; bringing the old ways of reading the landscape into contemporary life (e.g. Smiseth). Defining early and late prehistoric landscapes and segregating these into, say, mundane domestic and ritualised spaces rely on both clear and subtle archaeologies and in this volume distinct monument clustering and ritualised linearity are considered (e.g. Mason and Nash). A volume such as this cannot escape the influence of New World approaches, such as anthropology, and in many respects chapters by Bender, Muller and Merritt give context to other chapters within the book. Finally, one must consider text as a means of constructing landscape and this is considered by Heyd, who eloquently deconstructs the travel diary of a 17th century Japanese poet. This will be an important volume for archaeologists, landscape scholars and students. The many approaches used are tried and tested, forming an invaluable resource and not just another edited book. (shrink)

This study used a content analysis of television commercials to analyze the depiction of pre-teens and teens. It uncovered evidence that children are not often depicted in scholastic roles in the commercials. Further, it found that when children are shown in these roles, the portrayal is frequently not favorable. Various implications of the findings and recommendations to advertisers are set forth. Foremost among these is that television commercials do not seem to be assisting in forming positive (...) attitudes toward scholastic activities. More favorable depictions could improve the image of scholarly activity and assist in reducing criticisms of television advertising Advertiser's who seek action prescriptions as to how they might ethically depict children can benefit from applications of the study results to their creative efforts. (shrink)

Childhood is increasingly saturated by technology: from television to the Internet, video games to 'video nasties', camcorders to personal computers. _Children, Technology and Culture_ looks at the interplay of children and technology which poses critical questions for how we understand the nature of childhood in late modern society. This collection brings together researchers from a range of disciplines to address the following four aspects of this relationship between children and technology: *children's access to technologies and the (...) implications for social relationships *the structural contexts of children's engagement with technologies with a focus on gender and the family *the situatedness of children's interactions with technological objects *the constitution of children and childhood through the mediations of technology _ This book represents a substantial contribution to contemporary social scientific thinking both about the nature of children and childhood, the social impacts of technologies and the various relationships between the two. (shrink)

The authors examine the conceptual frameworks and substantive ideas of three authors, Lawrence Cremin, Neil Postman and Christopher Lasch, all of whom view technologies as educators. The authors focus on the television as educator and exposit these thinkers' views about relations between television's education and the education of schools, families and communities. The broader social significance involves an examination of the extent to which television's education impoverishes public discourse, the lifeblood of democracy; and the extent to which (...) television's education weakens parents' efforts to educate their children. Cremin and Postman lead the way in respectively providing a framework of analysis and identifying the problems but Cremin fails to recognize the severity of the problems and Postman does not adequately address them. Lasch's work is most promising, his formu lations fit neatly within Cremin's framework but address the problems in a way that improves upon Postman. (shrink)

This article describes a policy-driven project Marketing of unhealthy food directed to children, which represents the first extensive study of food and beverage advertising and marketing to children in Sweden. The project mapped out food and beverage advertisements directed to Swedish children to provide policymakers with current data about marketing trends to inform the debate concerning the regulation of food advertising in response to childhood obesity. The nature, number and placement of advertisements on television and in (...) the internet that encourage children to buy food and beverages were surveyed during one week in 2005 and 2007. The article summarizes the TV and Internet study results, stakeholder views and public opinion, and discusses the policy implications of digital media and the marketing of unhealthy food and beverages to Swedish children. (shrink)

This research aims to analyze the influencing factors of migrant children’s education integration based on the convolutional neural network algorithm. The attention mechanism, LSTM, and GRU are introduced based on the CNN algorithm, to establish an ALGCNN model for text classification. Film and television review data set, Stanford sentiment data set, and news opinion data set are used to analyze the classification accuracy, loss value, Hamming loss, precision, recall, and micro-F1 of the ALGCNN model. Then, on the big (...) data platform, data in the Comprehensive Management System of Floating Population and Rental Housing, Student Status Information Management System, and Student Information Management System of Beijing city are taken as samples. The ALGCNN model is used to classify and compare related data. It is found that in the MR, STT, and MPQA data sets, the classification accuracy and loss value of the ALGCNN model are better than other algorithms. HL is the lowest, the Pre is second only to the BERT algorithm, and the Re and F1 are both higher than other algorithms. From 2015 to 2019, the number of migrant children in different grades of elementary school shows a gradual increase. Among migrant children, the number of migrant children from other counties in this province is evidently higher than the number of migrant children from other provinces. Among children of migrant workers, the number of immigrants from other counties in this province is also notably higher than the number of immigrants from other provinces. With the gradual increase in the years, the proportion of township-level expenses shows a gradual decrease, whereas the proportion of district and county-level expenses shows a gradual increase. Moreover, the accuracy of the ALGCNN model in migrant children and local children data classification is 98.6 and 98.9%, respectively. The proportion of migrant children in the first and second grades of a primary school in Beijing city is obviously higher than that of local children. The average final score of local children was greatly higher than that of migrant children, whereas the scores of migrant children’s listening methods, learning skills, and learning environment adaptability are lower, which shows that an effective text classification model is established based on the CNN algorithm. In short, the children’s education costs, listening methods, learning skills, and learning environment adaptability are the main factors affecting migrant children’s educational integration, and this work provides a reference for the analysis of migrant children’s educational integration. (shrink)

This study involved a content analysis of the degree of portrayal and the favoribility of portrayal of African American children, as they were cast in various roles. It was hypothesized that these children would be less frequently and less positively portrayed in scholarly than in other roles and that scholarly depiction would vary among product classes. The research results did not support the first two but did support the third hypothesis. Various implications of the findings were drawn.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From Children's Perspectives:A Model of Aesthetic Processing in TheatreJeanne Klein (bio)Since the children's theatre movement began, producers have sought to create artistic theatre experiences that best correspond to the adult-constructed aesthetic "needs" of young audiences by categorizing common differences according to age groups. For decades, directors simply chose plays on the basis of dramatic genres (e.g., fairy tales), as defined by children's presupposed interests or "tastes," (...) by subscribing to Winifred Ward's broad descriptions of the "imaginative period" (ages six to nine), the "heroic period" (ages nine to twelve), and the "romantic period" (over age thirteen).1 Years later, Moses Goldberg elaborated upon these generalized divisions while cautioning that "no individual fits exactly into any set of categories."2 In his position paper on aesthetic development, he argued for individual access to aesthetic techniques, processes, and products for all ages, paralleled by four stages of cognitive capabilities, based on exposure to (1) arena-style participation theatre (for ages five to eight), which emphasizes story enactments; (2) a wide range of proscenium-style theatrical conventions; (3) relevant play content that directly relates characters' problems to spectators' lives and growing self-awareness; and (4) social issue plays that pose ethical dilemmas as cultural reflections.3 Meanwhile, Jed Davis compiled Age Group Profiles, organized by cognitive, spatial, emotional, and moral/ethical development, from his review of Piagetian literature; and Johnny Saldaña summarized stages of young interpretations of theatre from his seven-year longitudinal study.4Suffice it to say, the field of developmental psychology has come a long way since Piaget formulated his four constructivist stages. Since the mid-1950s, the cognitive revolution has spurred more integrated theories of information processing and depth-of-processing models that explain and predict how people construct schematic frameworks of knowledge and [End Page 40] assimilate and accommodate new information as a function of perception, attention, emotion, comprehension, memory, and social and moral behaviors. Although masculinist metaphors of hierarchical "staircases" and linear networks of associative learning still dominate computational models, feminist perspectives, which engender social cognitive, co-relational negotiations of narratives in situated contexts, have gained more widespread acceptance—by including theatre as an apt metaphor for development.5 Over the past twenty years or more, cognitive psychologists have finally discovered what dramatic theorists have known about narrative structures since Aristotle's Poetics: Powerful stories contain universal themes about the human condition through characters' conflicting actions. The most successful dramas are those that allow spectators to enter into a protagonist's psychological consciousness or "inner" vision in order to empathize with her "outer" reality.6While several developmental models of aesthetic understanding, experience, and appreciation exist in the realms of visual art and music education, few examples have been proposed in regard to theatre, particularly for child audiences.7 Instead, producers of Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) tend to romanticize its social and moral "effects" upon youth by believing passionately that viewing one remarkable performance has the potential (the operative word) to "cause" positive, social changes in children's minds, hearts, and behaviors, given the presumed "power of human imagination."8 This obsession with progressive change foregrounds adults' desires to control human destiny by predicting "causes and effects" located in children's responses to live performances. However, this "folk theory" fails to explain how young imaginations actually function aesthetically from the contextual evidence of reception studies with child audiences. Just as feminists have argued for a distinctive "feminist aesthetics," based on women's alternative ways of knowing,9 I argue that children gaze upon theatre in differential ways by including age as a variable factor. "Children's aesthetics," their perceived interpretations of theatre, differ from that of adults' theorized postulations, based in part on their shorter life experiences with this medium. To this end, over the course of my career, I have sought to understand theatre from children's perspectives by focusing my research in the social cognitive theories and social science methods of child development, primarily through the vast literature of television and mass media studies conducted with young people over the past forty years. In particular, medium-specific studies that parse theatrical forms from dramatic content... (shrink)

Many parents worry over their children’s gaming habits, but to what extent do such worries match any detrimental effects of excessive gaming? We attempted to answer this question by comparing children of highly concerned parents with other adolescents of the same age. A cohort of parents who identified as highly concerned over their children’s video game habits were recruited for a public study in collaboration with a national television network. Using an online experimental platform in conjunction (...) with surveys of parents’ beliefs and attitudes, we compared their children to age-matched peers in an exploratory case-control study. The scores of children with highly concerned parents on tests of cognitive control and psychological wellbeing were statistically similar to controls, suggesting no selective cognitive or psychological detriments from gaming or otherwise in the cases with concerned parents. The case group, however, did spend more time gaming, and scored higher than controls on problem gaming indicators, which also correlated negatively with wellbeing. Within the case group, wellbeing effects seemed mainly to consist in issues of relaxation and sleep, and related to gaming addiction indicators of playing to forget real-world problems, and the feeling of neglecting non-gaming activities. Where most results of research staged for TV never get published, making it difficult to interpret both methods and results, this paper describes findings and participant recruitment in detail. The relationship between parental concern and children’s gaming is discussed, as is the merits and challenges of research conducted with media, such as TV programs and their recruited on-screen participants. (shrink)

Background: Digital technologies such as smartphones, tablets and laptops have become a mainstay part of nearly every household and are gradually being integrated into the lives of both adults and children. We aim to determine the extent of exposure and usage of digital technology by children in their daily activities and to understand the transition in technological preferences and attitudes over the generation. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted on 400 children aged 05-12 years living in Prayagraj (...) city of Uttar Pradesh, India, using a pretested interview schedule. Descriptive and bivariate statistics were used for data analysis. The phenomenological method was used to understand respondents’ viewpoints about their preferences and attitudes related to technology. Results: An overwhelming majority of households have television followed by digital cameras, laptops, tablets, kindle and video games such as Playstation. Nearly half of children began to use digital devices from the age of 7 to 8 years. Nearly two-third of the children learnt to use digital devices on their own, and about 12% of them reported often practicing media multitasking. Over the generation, differences are noted in terms of possession, use and perception regarding digital technology. Conclusion: The availability of media content on such devices influences the screen time of children of all ages. The study underscores the importance of parental monitoring and devising a policy to regulate the ownership of digital devices and to reduce screen time to less than two hours per day, especially during early childhood. (shrink)

This is a review of the Japanese film, Like Father, Like Son. The movie tells the story of two families attempting to resolve the dilemma of learning that their 6-year old sons are actually not their biological children, but rather children swapped at birth by a nurse with malicious intent.

The amount of time that people spend on watching television is a matter of social concern. In the past, several approaches have been developed explaining why people expose themselves to television, most notably the Uses and Gratifications approach. Building on an action theoretical framework, it is argued that the influence of routinization and situational context of television viewing should receive more attention. This approach is then applied to media use in households, with an emphasis on how adolescents (...) and parents influence each other's television viewing. Event history on data from 55 Dutch households show that the influence of parents and their adolescent children is reciprocal, that is, not only do parents influence their children, but children also influence their parents. This influence does, however, not increase during the teenage years, nor does parental influence diminish during those years. (shrink)

The primary objective of this article is to describe how the children of soldiers critiqued and examined media representations of war. Taken from a more extensive qualitative case study involving eight teachers, this article examines one social studies teacher and her students’ perspectives on media coverage of war through two Socratic Seminar discussions focused on two wars: the American Civil War and Gulf War. Data was collected through interviews, focus groups, and classroom observations. Students leveled a specific set of (...) critiques at television media and those who consume it. They also grappled with two ethical quandaries: censorship and the justness of war. This article emerged from an unusual place – a Mathew Brady photograph. The teacher, a lecturer typically, decided to engage her students in discussion. This discussion was designed to provide “process and sense-making time,” according to their teacher, Ms. Jones, after four days of lecture on the American Civil War. Yet, the discussion grew into something much different than Ms. Jones's original plan. It evolved into an interrogation of how the media represents war. Inspired by the thoughtful discussion, several months later, Ms. Jones engaged the same students in an examination of media representations of the first Gulf War. Ms. Jones is the focus of this article because out of the eight other teachers in the larger qualitative study, she was the only one to focus on classroom time (two entire class sessions) on media representations of war. (shrink)

In both the academic and societal debates, it is widely assumed that cognitive advertising defenses can reduce children's susceptibility to advertising effects. Empirical evidence supporting this crucial assumption is however missing. It is precisely this gap that the present study aims to fill In a survey of 296 children, we investigate whether children's cognitive defenses reduce the relationship between the amount of television advertising they are exposed to and their desire for advertised product categories. Interaction analysis (...) in regression shows that of all the cognitive defense variables, only understanding advertising's persuasive intent was effective in reducing the impact of advertising exposure on children's advertised product desire. However, this only applies to the older children in the sample. For the younger children, understanding the persuasive intent even increased the impact of advertising. (shrink)

This primer of research on how television affects children and families is organized around the perceptions and insights of four ordinary families who are raising their children without any television in their homes. Readers will learn about the methods and findings of over 40 years of research on TV and, in the process, may change the way they look at television forever.

The role of digital technology in shaping attention and cognitive development has been at the centre of public discourse for decades. The current review presents findings from three main bodies of literature on the implications of technology use for attention and cognitive control: television, video games, and digital multitasking. The aim is to identify key lessons from prior research that are relevant for the current generation of digital users. In particular, the lack of scientific consensus on whether digital technologies (...) are good or bad for children reflects that effects depend on users’ characteristics, the form digital technologies take, the circumstances in which use occurs and the interaction between the three factors. Some features of digital media may be particularly problematic, but only for certain users and only in certain contexts. Similarly, individual differences mediate how, when and why individuals use technology, as well as how much benefit or harm can be derived from its use. The finding emerging from the review on the large degree of heterogeneity in associations is especially relevant due to the rapid development and diffusion of a large number of different digital technologies and contents, and the increasing variety of user experiences. We discuss the importance of leveraging existing knowledge and integrating past research findings into a broader organizing framework in order to guide emerging technology-based research and practice. We end with a discussion of some of the challenges and unaddressed issues in the literature and propose directions for future research. (shrink)

Narratives, also called stories, can be found in conversations, children’s play interactions, reading material, and television programs. From infancy to adulthood, narrative comprehension processes interpret events and inform our understanding of physical and social environments. These processes have been extensively studied to ascertain the multifaceted nature of narrative comprehension. From this research we know that three overlapping processes (i.e., knowledge integration, goal structure understanding, and causal inference generation) proposed by the constructionist paradigm are necessary for narrative comprehension, narrative (...) comprehension has a predictive relationship with children’s later reading performance, and comprehension processes are generalizable to other contexts. Much of the previous research has emphasized internal and predictive validity; thus, limiting the generalizability of previous findings. We are concerned these limitations may be excluding underrepresented populations from benefits and implications identified by early comprehension processes research. This review identifies gaps in extant literature regarding external validity and argues for increased emphasis on externally valid research. We highlight limited research on narrative comprehension processes in children from low-income and minority populations, and argue for changes in comprehension assessments. Specifically, we argue both on- and off-line assessments should be used across various narrative types (e.g., picture books, televised narratives) with traditionally underserved and underrepresented populations. We propose increasing the generalizability narrative comprehension processes research can inform persistent reading achievement gaps, and have practical implications for how children learn from narratives. (shrink)

This research sets out to study and compare the effects of story watching on television and story listening by an elder on children’s cognitive skills, specifically in building up their vocabulary and comprehension. A total of two hundred children aged between 7 to 12 years from low socio-economic background were selected through matching. They were divided into two different groups based on the medium they were exposed to, either oral or visual. The study took place in laboratories (...) set at four different schools in Karachi, Pakistan. Ten stories were told to the half children, while the other group watched 10 animated episodes having same content for 10 consecutive weeks. Children’s perception and vocabulary skills were evaluated through questionnaires, which were filled out after each story. Results affirmed the hypothesis that story listening is more effective than cartoon watching in terms of cognitive learning. The study is beneficial for various disciplines of social sciences including psychology, sociology, education and mass communication. (shrink)

This paper provides critical insights into the inclusion of sexual minorities in Flemish fictional TV shows aimed at children. Narratives including LGBT+ characters and non-normative gender performances have gained presence, and especially Nordic and Dutch productions have been acknowledged for their inclusive storytelling. Following up on this premise, our study analyzes five Flemish programs aimed at children aged six to twelve, which all include at least one character who identifies as LGBT+. Our analysis concludes that Flemish children’s (...) productions show a visible willingness to include diversified and inclusive storytelling. However, the assimilationist venture of minimizing the ‘otherness’ of non-heterosexual characters has led to a rather homogenous and normative portrayal of these characters. More stereotypical representations like frivolous singing hairdressers have now been replaced by rather heteronormative and gender-conforming characters. Not confining representations to either end of the spectrum are a necessity if Flemish children’s television wants its audience to understand the diversified range of sexual and gender identities. (shrink)

With the advent and popularity of Television by the end of 1950s and early 1960s, researchers focused the role and effects of this new medium on its growing audience. Himmelweit and Schramm are considered the pioneer researchers in the field. The volume of scientific studies regarding televised violence was largely increased following the landmark State Reports in US published between 1972 and 1982. These reports indicated that the proliferation of TV has exposed children to media violence at home. (...) However, violence is rarely caused by a single factor, it rather involves multiple factors. Signorielli in her book Violence in the Media rightly commented that television plays a unique role of an entertaining storyteller but the increasing commercialization of TV is a serious matter of concern.1 The objective of this literature review is to provide a holistic overview of the landmark studies conducted on televised violence and its contribution to real life crimes and violence in society. (shrink)

This study extends the examination of moral content in the media by exploring moral messages in television programming and viewer characteristics predictive of the ability to perceive such messages. Generalisability analyses confirmed the reliability of the Media’s Moral Messages (MMM) rating form for analysing programme content and the existence of 10 moral themes prevalent in television media. Standard regression analyses yielded evidence indicating viewers’ moral expertise, as measured by the Defining Issues Test (DIT), familiarity with the programme and (...) level of education predicted their ability to perceive moral messages in a television drama popular in the USA at the time of data collection. Identification of patterns in moral content represented in television programming, as well as knowledge of how viewer characteristics relate to their ability to perceive such content, can provide parents and educators with a means for better comprehending messages regarding human interaction to which they or their children are exposed. (shrink)

Three experiments were conducted to test whether watching an animated show with frequent fantastical events decreased Chinese preschoolers’ post-viewing executive function, and to test possible mechanisms of this effect. In all three experiments, children were randomly assigned to watch a video with either frequent or infrequent fantastical events; their EF was immediately assessed after viewing, using behavioral measures of working memory, sustained attention, and cognitive flexibility. Parents completed a questionnaire to assess preschoolers’ hyperactivity level as a potential confounding variable. (...) In Experiment 1, which also included a control group, there was an immediate negative effect of watching frequent fantastical events, as seen in lower scores on the behavioral EF tasks. In Experiment 2, eye tracking data showed more but shorter eye fixations in the high frequency group, suggesting a higher demand on cognitive resources; this group also did more poorly on behavioral measures of EF. In Experiment 3, functional near-infrared spectroscopy data showed that the high frequency group had a higher concentration of oxygenated hemoglobin, an indicator of higher brain activation consistent with a greater use of cognitive resources; this group also had lower scores on the behavioral EF tasks. The findings are discussed in reference to models of limited cognitive resources. (shrink)